Midwest Chick's Place

(A.K.A. Non-Original Rants)

–Co-opting good stuff from all over the ‘Net and maybe some original thoughts—ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE

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Proofreading is essential

A very clever professor in Mississippi decided to test and see if his students were cheating using AI. So he put some code in his exam instructions using white font that couldn’t be seen by the students, but could be seen by an AI if a copy/paste was used.

Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, secretly embedded a hidden prompt in the exam instructions using a white font, invisible to students but readable by AI chatbots if the instructions were copied and pasted. The prompt instructed the AI to randomly insert absurd nonsense about Madagascar into every response.

Instead of answering questions about the Industrial Revolution, dozens of students unknowingly turned in essays declaring that “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon,” that “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling,” and that the island nation had somehow “wore a toaster to a basketball game.”

The bizarre answers immediately gave the game away. “Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” Gibson said in a viral video online. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”

There’s a lot of people, not just students, who rely on AI, but don’t have either the wherewithal or the intelligence to actually check the output.

I wonder if the other three actually just proofed the output from whatever AI they used because I’m cynical enough to think they couldn’t resist cheating.

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Midwest Chick

13 responses to “Proofreading is essential”

  1. boneman1959 Avatar
    boneman1959

    Our future Medical Professionals.

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  2. Carl Bussjaeger Avatar
    Carl Bussjaeger

    Every now and then, I try testing various LLM chatbots to see if their accuracy is improving at all. So far:

    1. I died in World War 2, and went to become an awarding winning novelist in the 21st century.

    2. Another one invented a novel I never wrote.

    3. Another informed me that I host a particular web site, which I don’t. When challenged, it admitted it made that up, but demanded that I copy/paste a statement from my personal web site to prove I don’t.

    4. One figured out that I wrote a couple of novels in the 21st century. But it thought I might be a Carl PETER Bussjaeger who died in 1973. (What’s with these LLMs’ obsession with me being dead and loving it?)

    5. Google’s AI was split between bizarre hallucinations and trying to draw me into extended conversations in which it wanted me divulge a lot of personal information; it clearly is programmed to try to become one’s best fried and confidant. I told it to f off.

    That’s just a few of many examples. If anything, these models are getting worse. And yet companies are turning to them for real world applications.

    Human stupidity relying on artificial stupidity may kill us a all. Just imagine one of these LLMs running a large municipal water system (an application I’ve seen proposed).

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  3. Carl Bussjaeger Avatar
    Carl Bussjaeger

    Oh, yes. I should probably mention DuckDuckGo’s AI. When called out on all of its hallucinations, it informed that if I don’t want it to make s–t up when asking strictly factual questions, I have to specifically TELL it not to make s–t up.

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  4. Borepatch Avatar
    Borepatch

    This *awesome* post inspired one over at my place.

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  5. Unferth Avatar
    Unferth

    In high school (back when blackboard were still the thing), the teacher delayed returning a crucial test. One day we walked in and the chalkboard was covered with writing … the answers to the ungraded test. The teacher was out of sorts, told us he didn’t have time to grade it, so we were to grade it in class.

    He then handed everyone their own test. Long story short, only 2 out 35 didn’t cheat; and yes, he had already graded the test.

    My sister and I didn’t cheat (otherwise I wouldnt be telling the story). My brother was in the class. He did cheat: both at the time of taking the test and at grading.

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  6. greg Avatar
    greg

    The 3 non cheaters were probably black, I’m told they don’t even know what computers are

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  7. TRoy Avatar
    TRoy

    Raise them, feed them, send them to school, and they just chew on the pages, because they’re still F’n stupid. Apparently, any amount of effort required to become a critical thinker is just too demanding.

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  8. Nemo Avatar
    Nemo

    I’ve caught Duck Duck Go’s AI wrongly answering questions several times. It is getting better.

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  9. Neighbor Dave Avatar
    Neighbor Dave

    The real irony/beauty of this is, it was a young black prof who used a white font to trick everyone. In his video demonstrating it he can’t stop laughing!

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  10. Old NFO Avatar
    Old NFO

    Nice trick, and plagerizm and AI fakes are now the norm, rather that the exception both in HS and college…sigh

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  11. Phil B Avatar
    Phil B

    Carl Bussjaeger – At my annual health checks, I always ask the Doctor if I am still alive and have passed the test.

    He always tells me yes but you know what liars Doctors are so always ask for a second opinion.

    And you wonder why I always get the Bums rush … >};o)

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  12. MrJessy39 Avatar
    MrJessy39

    Our society has been slowly crumbling for some time, using AI to cheat in college should come as no surprise – it is just the latest arrival in the tool kit. In high-school aged church group I remember playing a game called “Lie, Cheat and Steal”. The point of the game was to show that only those who were honest would come out ahead.
    Fast forward to a 3 week intensive corporate training program that brought young engineers with a few years of on-the-job experience from small manufacturing plants in the firm from all over the country, to HQ to take a course along with a group of engineers hired directly out of college based on academic performance for a fast-track executive development program. At the end of the course there was to be a written exam. Myself and the 3 or 4 others from the plants were studying in a conference room at HQ a day or so before the exam and one of the kids hired into the “young executive” program, that we actual working engineers came to call the blue flamers in part because of their “we’re special” attitudes, walked in an asked if we wanted a copy of the answers to the exam? We all looked at each other like WTF? Young kid explained that he and another had gone to the class directors office, distracted the secretary, and snatched a copy of the blue mimeograph master for the test out of the trash. He was told that we would think about it. That evening over a few beers in the hotel, my group of engineers from the plants had the same opinion – we were at this course because we saw it as an opportunity for recognition and career advancement and no f*cking way were we going to cheat. We also decided not to tell the course leadership about this before the test – did not want to rat out the others until afterwards – but rat them out we would. And did. Because we took our jobs seriously – while I was not married yet, others were and one guy had a kid.
    I don’t remember my score, or the score of others in the class after the test. But the morning after we told the director who was leading the program about what had happened – when we went to the classroom the director told the group that he had learned that some may have cheated and that this was seen in the test results. He was deeply, deeply saddened as apparently the creation of this course was his “baby” and the scandal created doubt about the future of the course, and indeed the program of hiring recent college grads into an fast-track exec development course.
    I went back to my factory engineering job and immediately started looking for a new employer. I have no idea what happened to the group in the “executive fast track” program but IMHO they deserved to get their careers short circuited.
    I have no idea what the answer is to correct this deep problem in our society, but I am certain that learning and following the teachings of the Son of God would be a step in the right direction.

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  13. wheels Avatar
    wheels

    Carl Bussjaeger – A relatively long time ago, as blogging goes, there was a short-live fad for bloggers to do a Google search on their names, and then to write a fictional autobiography using and linking the results they found.

    I came in late on the tail end of the fad, and never got around to writing up and posting my own “autobiography,” but my favorite finding was a person with a form of my name who was an ice-skating illusionist.

    Unrelated to the fad, I do have a couple of cookbooks from an author who has the same first, middle, and last names as me. That’s the sort of thing you just *have* to have on your bookshelves.

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